Are You Eating Cheese?
by Acepilot6
Summary: No.31 in the Road series. Back to normal, no poetry here! Just Chuckie, Phil, Tommy, Dil and sixmonth old James in the kitchen. Mess? Certainly. Chaos? Inevitable. Chuckie drinking the baby's milk? Hmmm... Please read and review!


**Are You Eating Cheese?  
**Acepilot

AN - No.31 in the Road series. Part of a little subplot about the gang going on vacation that may expand into another couple of fics. Anyway, this is just a bit of random silliness. I've tried to minimize the similarities between this and Some Romantic Evening - hopefully there aren't many. Enjoy!

Disclaimer - the characters in this fanfiction are property of KlaskyCsupo, except Amanda, who is mine. And James, who is mine, Tommy's and Lil's.

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"You get him around the legs, Chuckie can grab his arms and I'll tie him up."

"I can hear you, you know," I tell Dil as I carefully fry some tomatoes, wary of burning them as I had so many times before on similar endeavors.

The eternally youthful Pickles spins on me with flour on his face, a chef's hat on his head, and a glare that could kill. He holds the wooden spoon he's been constructing some kind of sauce with toward me like he intends to do just that. "That's kind of the point. You know, when we all decided to go on holidays, I thought maybe I'd get to lay on a beach, talk to the whales, do something like that. And what do I end up doing?" He slams down his spoon, sending grated cheese flying in all directions. "Cooking! You guys may not cook every night at home, but I do. So how did I draw this crap duty?"

"Because you're the best cook," I tell him.

"No," Tommy interrupts, cutting up onions, "because you convinced us that this was a good idea."

"It is. Come on, guys, it's perfect. We're on a beach, we're having a great time, we cook the girls dinner and they'll be putty in our hands," I assure them, even as I feel my own confidence in the plan slipping away.

The original plan - to go on vacation - had been easy enough. Lil had been feeling a bit down ever since James' birth - mild post natal depression - and Tommy had, in turn, been going nuts with worry over her. So the decision had been made to treat them both to a week or two away. And, of course, we all had to come along for good measure. Just so they wouldn't get lonely.

That, and the resort had offered us a really great deal.

The more specific plan that we'd give the girls a beautiful, romantic meal in our suite's common room was one of my concoction and required a great deal more thought than I'd probably given it. Kimi had suggested that she, Amanda and Angelica take Lil out for the day to a whole bunch of "girly" places, and Tommy and I had more than readily thrown our weight behind the suggestion, knowing that it would probably do Lil the world of good. Therefore it was at about eleven o'clock this morning that I had had my stroke of genius, to make dinner and have a perfect atmosphere for the girls when they got back, and somehow I had sold it to the guys on the basis that it would be perfectly simple.

I look forlornly at the flowers Chuckie is trying to arrange in a vase, the remains of the vegetables I was meant to be chopping up, and Tommy's own mangled onion, and wonder how they hadn't seen through this plan in an eyeblink.

"Personally, I don't need to cook Angelica anything to get her to fall into bed with me," Chuckie tells us.

I raise an eyebrow, turning to face the elder of our little collective. "I always wondered which one of you wore the chef's hat in your relationship."

"Oh, I do, but she kind of sleeps with me in spite of the food, rather than because of it," Chuckie assures us.

I shake my head worriedly, and Tommy looks over at me with amusement playing in his eyes. "And how about you, Mr. DeVille? Are you chained to a stove every night?"

"Sometimes. We take turns. She kind of got really determined to be a better cook than me."

"She'd want to be." I don't know if Dil intended for me to hear the utterance or not, but I'm somehow not surprised by it.

"You wanted us to help out," I tell him. "Make up your mind, do you want our help or do you want to do it on your own?"

"I want your help so you don't ruin anything else," Dil tells me. "And your tomatoes are burning."

I smell the smoke the instant after he says it, and I spin around to see my tomatoes starting to spit flames. I recoil in fright for a moment, before remembering that I'm supposed to be able to deal with silly little things like this. I grab a teatowel and fling it over the flames, but end up missing long and the towel catches fire as it brushes up against the gas hotplate. I feel my throat muscles constrict as my stomach tries to jump out my throat and I'm vaguely aware of my eyes going wide.

Tommy takes a shot with a fire blanket that he appropriated from a nearby drawer, but he only manages to cover some of the flames, with the remainder burning along happily. The teatowel is now utterly and completely aflame, and Tommy and I exchange broadly worried looks, standing like stunned mullets before Chuckie finally cuts in between us with a fire extinguisher and douses the whole extravaganza.

Dil makes a kind of pained sigh and continues making his sauce, dicing some bacon.

I look to recover what's left of my tomatoes but discover quickly that it's a well and truly lost cause, that the tomatoes have gone to whatever haven they go to when they are burnt to death by a moronic wannabe-chef.

Tommy cuts across me and grabs one of James' bottles from their resting place on the bench so he can fill it. "I'm amazed he hasn't woken up with all the racket we're making."

"Thank your lucky stars for small favors and just keep going," Chuckie suggests, finally happy with his flowers and standing up to face us. "Anything I can do?"

"Cut more tomatoes for the genius here," Dil suggests.

I have one thing to say about Dil. Actually, that's a lie - I have many things to say about Dil, but most of them aren't fit for polite conversation. Anyway, Dil, as my best friend, is someone who I know very well. I know his eccentricities, his oddities, his strangest moments and his more sane theories. And I have one observation in particular that I have made over the time I have known him - put him in a street full of people and he'll do something weird. But put him in a kitchen and he becomes an almighty, dry-witted tyrant of the cutlery. No trace of his normal personality remains.

Strange, but true.

I'm going to have to ask Amanda how she deals with it sometime.

"What am I meant to do while he does that?" I ask, looking around for some way to help out with the plan that I had formulated then rapidly lost control of.

As if on cue, James begins crying.

"Take care of James," Dil suggests, now finely shredding some spring onions.

I shrug and make good my escape, deciding that, at the moment, there are worse things than being in the kitchen.

When I return, with a gurgling and hungry six-month-old James in my possession, the other's don't seem to even notice. Which is fine by me - I sit down in a dining room chair with my nephew and bounce him on my knee. "Can someone pass me his bottle?"

Dil nods and goes to pass me the bottle when he stops, just in front of the bench.

"What is it?" I ask, and everyone else stops their cooking duties to look as well.

"Uh..." Dil goes lightly pink. "I hate to say it, but..."

He steps back to reveal two bottles, both equally full of what appears to be milk.

Tommy speaks for all of us when he says, "Yeah, so?"

"So one of those is my warmed condensed milk for the sauce and the other one is..."

"Lil's breast milk," I groan, banging my head on the table.

"Yeah. And there's no way to tell which one," Dil summarizes.

"We could taste them," Chuckie suggests.

"No!" Tommy nixes that idea. "What if you got James' bottle by mistake?"

"Then one of us would have drunk a bit of Lil's milk," I practically laugh off. "Not like the world's going to come to an end. A bit weird, maybe - "

"A bit weird! A bit weird?" Tommy is going a dark shade of red. "There is no way any of you is drinking my wife's breast milk!"

"Well what are we meant to do to tell them apart?" Dil asks. "Flip a coin?"

"Then we might get it in the sauce," I point out. "Why did you use a bottle, anyway?"

"It was convenient," Dil offers lamely.

"I can't believe you!" Tommy growls.

"I can't believe _you_," Chuckie cuts in. "You're making a big deal about nothing. You can try it if you're really that worried."

"No!" The dark red that had been tingeing Tommy's cheeks was quickly sliding up the spectrum towards a bright orange. "I don't want to try it, either!"

"You mean you haven't..."

I let that sentence trail off as Tommy looks at me with homicidal rage in his eyes.

I hold James up in front of me. "You can't hurt me, I'm holding your only child."

"Chuckie, get the baby," my brother-in-law growls.

"Oh, look, this is stupid," the red-head declares, grabs both bottles and splashes a little from each on his wrists. Tommy spins around and sees what he's doing, but before the eldest Pickles can even react, Chuckie all but inhales the milk from his left wrist. Tommy's halfway across the room in a second, but Chuckie is again faster, covering his right wrist and swallowing contemplatively. "This one is James'," he declares, picking up a bottle. Tommy has his hands extended to throttle his best friend, and Chuckie takes the opportunity to stick one of the bottles into it.

All the aggression seems to slide off Tommy's face as he stares at Chuckie in disbelief. "You...you..."

Chuckie hands Dil the other bottle, and he makes good his opportunity, dumping the milk in the sauce and immediately rinsing the bottle.

"You...you..."

"Your head is going to explode if you don't breathe, Tommy," Chuckie says, taking the other by the arm and leading him toward where I'm sitting with James. "Here, feed your son, and let Phil chop the vegetables."

Tommy's in something of a haze as I hand him his child and quickly put as much distance between the two of us as possible, looking perpetually over my shoulder to make sure he's not preparing to jump on me with a knife or something.

"What happened to the easily frightened Finster we all knew and loved?" I ask as I sidle up next to Chuck.

"When living with Angelica," he tells me, "you either develop a spine or get walked all over. Or maybe," he concedes, "you do both."

- 0 - 0 -

When Kimi, Lil, Amanda and Angelica arrive back to the hotel for the night, we proudly present them with a spectacular, three-course meal, prepared by their doting men, and make very certain not to let them see the massive mess we've left in the kitchen which we will - being men, of course - clean up in the morning.

My fiance' has some kind of sixth sense about these things, and I'm not at all surprised to see her grinning at me when we sit down at the table to eat. "Wow, guys," she says, sarcasm creeping into her voice, "thanks for going to all this trouble for us."

I feel the collective glares of my three co-conspirators and the back of my neck glow red as I assure her, "It was no trouble at all."


End file.
